Is it realistic to rewrite your AGENTS.md every six weeks? That's about how often Anthropic releases a new point release of Opus.

I have had very little luck with agents.md. What has worked well for me is a ./docs folder. They seem to just create and update stuff on their own.

If you want this it's trivial to add an AGENTS.md that simply says "if you're Claude read CLAUDE.md, if you're Astra read ASTRA.md". A common entry point is good regardless.

By this logic you'd probably be wise to tier your claude.md by model (sonnet/opus) as well as effort level too, considering the varying failure modes

depends what you're doing. if you've got a specialized agent deployed in prod, of course your evals and prompts will be targeted towards 1 specific version of a model.

on the other hand if it's just a local coding/"use my computer" agent, i highly doubt the effort in maintaining different prompts is worth any gain in performance

No thanks, I'm not tuning a bunch of files just for things to break when I switch models or a new one comes out.

I'll just use my one-size-fits-all AGENTS.md file and tweak it when the one of the clankers screw up. I don't have time for such busywork.

Actually, I will append extra rules to CLAUDE.md (which imports AGENTS.md) since there is a hook there, and Claude has its own foibles. So I'll backpedal a bit there.

It looks for Claude.md first so I don't understand what you think the problem is with the standard name as a fallback.

Yeah but are models good enough to review these files and say “i would work better if you worded it this way?”

That's of course rather nonsensical.

In a "one LLM only" environment, your instructions are by default tuned for said LLM.

In a multi-LLM environment, roughly nobody will keep separate sets of instructions for each. It's not a realistic take.

On top of that: If your LLM is so bad at reading that it can't follow a set of instructions that wasn't specifically written just for that one single precious LLM, I sure wonder what that says about your employers repeated statements that ASI is definitely right around the corner.

claude.md predates agents.md.

    ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md

I tried that before, it doesn’t work. Claude will not prioritize AGENTS instructions the same way it did for CLAUDE.

ln was the only thing that worked for me

It's "finally" because people have been asking for it for a long time. No one cares that "claude was first," what they want is for Ant to follow the conventions and not put extra work on us. This was such a minimal thing to do, and considering how much they vibe and claim "coding is solved," we thought it would not be too difficult to respect AGENTS.md, so finally seeing it happen, while nice, is too late for me. I've moved on from Big Ai and only use open weight models now.

There’s also that whole MCP thing.